Jonno Roberts: Theater diary

Jonno Roberts is writing weekly about his experiences rehearsing and performing in the Old Globe's Summer Shakespeare Festival for the Union-Tribune's Sunday Arts section. Roberts is playing Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew” and Edmund in “King Lear.”

Shakespeare famously described life as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” To Adrian Noble — one of the foremost Shakespeare directors on the globe (and now, as it happens, practicing that art at the Globe) — sound is the very essence of the Bard’s work, and it signifies everything.

In his scores of productions over the past 25 years or so, and in his newly published book “How to Do Shakespeare,” the new artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre’s 2010 Shakespeare Festival returns again and again to the importance of listening to the plays.

In his estimation, this is one canon that should never be greeted with plugged ears.

“It’s the most important thing, really,” says Noble, who led England’s esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company for nearly 13 years beginning in 1991. “I always say to actors that you have to make audiences listen. I don’t think people do necessarily listen. We’re not used to it. We’re used to looking at things.”

How that approach will change the nature of the Globe’s annual festival should start to become apparent this week, when Noble rolls out “King Lear,” the first of the three plays to open. Noble is directing “Lear” and the fest’s one non-Shakespeare entry, “The Madness of George III”; Ron Daniels, last at the Globe in 2009 with “Kingdom,” directs “The Taming of the Shrew.”

While the previous artistic director, Darko Tresnjak — who led the festival from its revival in 2004 through last year — stressed the importance of text, his productions also were known for their eye-catching style.

But Noble, who is 59, has been ears-deep in the aural aspects of Shakespeare since he was a kid in Chichester, England.

“When I was about 10, my Grandma gave me his complete works,” Noble recalls. “Very cheap – Woolworth’s. Ten shillings, it cost. I’ve never known why she did that. I never asked. I should’ve asked.

“She was a woman who left school at 12 or 13, a farm laborer’s daughter, never had the education or money. But she bought me this Shakespeare book.

“So I started saying these speeches out loud, and I found them quite intoxicating. I loved doing them. I had stumbled upon a rather good way in, which was to say the lines out loud.”

In focusing on the sonic structure of Shakespeare’s poetry, Noble doesn’t discount the importance of interpreting what it all means.

But “I tend not to do that, to be perfectly honest,” he says. “Because it interests me less. Not that the meaning interests me less, but I find the play talks to me more if I allow it to talk to me. I think Shakespeare is more interesting than I am.”

He adds with a laugh: “Or indeed, than most people I know.”

Noble uses the opera “The Marriage of Figaro” as an example: You don’t need to understand what Mozart had in mind when he wrote it to map out the ways its musical transitions work. That work is a helpful example, since it was another opera Noble directed — Verdi’s Shakespeare-derived “Macbeth,” for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2007 — that helped bring him to the Globe.

Louis G. Spisto, the theater’s CEO/executive producer, saw that production as well as Noble’s “Hamlet” at the 2008 Stratford Festival in Canada and was inspired to pursue the director as the successor to Tresnjak, who had decided to leave the Globe.

Once aboard, Noble conferred with Spisto on which plays to produce for his first season (the Globe has since confirmed that Noble will return as festival artistic director in 2011).

“Lou said to me he wanted, ideally, a kind of big play, a signature play,” Noble recalls. “I’d just done ‘Hamlet,’ (so) I didn’t want to do ‘Hamlet.’ And I came across ‘King Lear’ and I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to find a King Lear.’

“And he said, ‘I know a King Lear.’ “

That turned out to be Robert Foxworth, the veteran stage, film and TV actor who brought a memorable bite to the role of the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the 2009 Globe production of Mark Olsen’s “Cornelia.”

As it turned out, Foxworth was looking for someone who was looking for a Lear.

“I’ve been carrying a copy of the play around for several years, hoping that someone would get the idea,” says Foxworth, a Globe associate artist who moved to Encinitas not long ago. “I think in a way, Wallace was my audition for Lear. I think here at the theater, they said, ‘Hmmm, maybe he can do that.’ ”

As for why he had begun seeking the role in the first place: “Age,” Foxworth responds with a quick laugh. “For about the past eight years I’ve thought, ‘Well, I’d better do it within this decade, because I won’t be able to do it afterward.’ ”

Foxworth, part of the sprawling cast of fest returnees, newcomers and USD/Globe graduate student actors who will perform the three plays in nightly repertory, says Noble’s focus on language has been revelatory for him.

“I’ve found, frankly, that virtually all my preconceptions of the play and character were blown away by his opening new doors,” Foxworth says. “It’s been a wonderful surprise — taking the language and letting it open up for us in a new and surprising way.

“I kind of get a little inarticulate about it because it’s such an experiential thing that it’s hard to describe. (But) finding ways of saying it that excite and engage an audience, so they’re not allowed to lay back and watch a play happen at them. The language sets up an excitement from us to them, so that we’re all participants.”

In order to help the Shakespeare segment of the festival mesh more gracefully with the Bennett play, which was first produced in 1991 (and spawned the movie “The Madness of King George” in 1994), Noble sends Lear forward into the 18th century.

The Bennett play “creates a marvelous dialogue with ‘King Lear,’ actually,” Noble says. “They’re parallel themes. Madness, obviously. A very strict court with very strong social mores, which disintegrate. And I’ve always been fascinated with the politics of the 18th century,” the historical setting for “George.”

“Then I had this further thought, which was to start both the plays at the same point. So I started ‘King Lear’ just after the American Revolution, because George goes on about losing the American colonies.”

Noble knows a little about difficult partings. His work at the RSC stretched even further back than his tenure as artistic director, and in that time he directed such big names (or names-to-be) as Kenneth Branagh and Ralph Fiennes.

But he left in turmoil over his ambitious plans to revamp the company (and amid apparent resentment over his work on the movie-based musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” a hit on London’s West End in 2002 and a Broadway transfer in 2005).

Noble says the criticism wasn’t what led him to leave. It was more that by the time he left, he was spending 25 percent or 30 percent of his time on artistic matters, and the rest on politics, administration, fundraising and speechmaking — 20 or 25 speeches a week, he says.

“It wasn’t so much the sniping,” Noble says, borrowing (briefly) his interviewer’s characterization. “Although I wouldn’t put it that way at all, I’d call it a blitzkrieg, actually. It wasn’t sniping at all.

“The job had changed completely, partly of my own doing. And a lot of it I enjoyed hugely. But I’d had enough of it. So the nice thing about leaving the RSC is I could just do what I wanted to do.

“Coming here is very nice,” he concludes with a smile, “because I don’t have to do any of the boring stuff.”